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  For Kate Garrick

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When people who know I’m vegan hear I’ve written a novel about cannibals (ghouls, really, but “cannibals” is easier), they think it’s bizarre, hilarious, or both. The short version is that I believe the world would be a far safer place if we, as individuals and as a society, took a hard, honest look at our practice of flesh eating along with its environmental and spiritual consequences. To that end, I’d like to thank Will Tuttle, whose book The World Peace Diet helped me clarify my purpose as I was revising Bones & All, and Victoria Moran, mentor, friend, and vegan superstar.

  I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Mrs. Drue Heinz and everyone at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, who gave me the time and space (not to mention nourishment) to redraft the manuscript in January 2013: Hamish, Ally, Mary, Georgina, and my fellows Helena, Kirsty, Melanie, Colin, and Tendai—thank you so much for your support. Thanks also to Ann Marie DiBlasio and Sally Kim for writing the recommendations to get me there.

  I give thanks to Nova Ren Suma and Rachel Cantor for their early excitement (when all I had was “cannibals in love!”) over dinner at Dirt Candy, to Seanan McDonnell for being as thorough and as thoughtful as ever, to Kelly Brown and McCormick Templeman for their insight and enthusiasm, and to Elizabeth Duvivier, Amiee Wright, Deirdre Sullivan, Diarmuid O’Brien, Ailbhe Slevin, and Christian O’Reilly for all their kindness and encouragement. Love to Maggie Ginsberg-Schutz and Sarah Paré Miller for hosting me in Wisconsin and to Gail Lowry and Paul Brotchie for showing me how to make “hobo stew.” And thank you, as always, to Brian DeFiore, Shaye Areheart, Adrian Frazier, and Mike McCormack.

  My agent, Kate Garrick, put a massive amount of work into each draft. It was well beyond her job description and I’m so grateful for her belief in me. Sara Goodman, you are wonderful and I am thrilled to be on your list. Shout-outs to Alicia Clancy, Melissa Hastings, Olga Grlic, Paul Hochman, Lauren Hougen, Melanie Sanders, Courtney Sanks, Steven Seighman, Justin Velella, George Witte, and everyone else who loved this book at St. Martin’s, and to Hana Osman and the rest of the team at Penguin UK.

  Thank you most of all to my family—blood and as good as—who have always taken it for granted that a story of mine is a story worth reading.

  Someday I’ll wake up and find they’ve built a maze around me, and I will be relieved.

  1

  Penny Wilson wanted a baby of her own in the worst way. That’s what I figure, because she was only supposed to watch me for an hour and a half, and obviously she loved me a little too much. She must have hummed a lullaby, fondled each tiny finger and toe, kissed my cheeks and stroked the down on my head, blowing on my hair like she was making a wish on a dandelion gone to seed. I had my teeth but I was too small to swallow the bones, so when my mother came home she found them in a pile on the living room carpet.

  The last time my mother had looked at Penny Wilson she’d still had a face. I know Mama screamed, because anyone would have. When I was older she told me she thought my babysitter had been the victim of a satanic cult. She’d stumbled upon stranger things in suburbia.

  It wasn’t a cult. If it had been, they would have snatched me away and done unspeakable things to me. There I was, asleep on the floor beside the bone pile, tears still drying on my cheeks and blood wet around my mouth. I loathed myself even then. I don’t remember any of this, but I know it.

  Even when my mother noticed the gore down the front of my OshKosh overalls, even when she registered the blood on my face, she didn’t see it. When she parted my lips and put her forefinger inside—mothers are the bravest creatures, and mine is the bravest of all—she found something hard between my gums. She pulled it out and peered at it. It was the hammer of Penny Wilson’s eardrum.

  Penny Wilson had lived in our apartment complex, across the courtyard. She’d lived alone and worked odd jobs, so no one would miss her for days. That was the first time we had to pick up and move in a hurry, and I often wonder if my mother had an inkling then how efficient she’d become. The last time we moved she packed us up in twelve minutes flat.

  Not so long ago I asked her about Penny Wilson: What did she look like? Where was she from? How old was she? Did she read a lot of books? Was she nice? We were in the car, but not on the way to a new city. We never talked about what I’d done right after I’d done it.

  “What do you want to know all this for, Maren?” she sighed, rubbing at her eyes with her thumb and forefinger.

  “I just do.”

  “She was blond. Long blond hair, and she always wore it loose. She was still young—younger than I was—but I don’t think she had many friends. She was very quiet.” Then Mama’s voice snagged on a memory she hadn’t wanted to find. “I remember how her face lit up when I asked if she could watch you that day.” She looked angry as she brushed the tears away with the back of her hand. “See? There’s no point thinking about these things when there’s nothing you can do to change any of it. What’s done is done.”

  I thought for a minute. “Mama?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What did you do with the bones?”

  She took so long to reply that I began to be afraid of the answer. There was, after all, a suitcase that always came with us that I had never seen her open. Finally she said, “There are some things I’m never going to tell you no matter how many times you ask.”

  My mother was kind to me. She never said things like what you did or what you are.

  * * *

  Mama was gone. She’d gotten up while it was still dark, packed a few things, and left in the car. Mama didn’t love me anymore. How could I blame her if she never did?

  Some mornings, once we’d been in a place long enough that we could begin to forget, she’d wake me up with that song from Singin’ in the Rain.

  “Good morning, good moooooooorning! We’ve talked the whole night through…”

  Except she always sounded kind of sad as she sang it.

  On May 30th, the day I turned sixteen, my mother came in singing. It was a Saturday, and we had planned a full day of fun. I hugged my pillow and asked, “Why do you always sing it like that?”

  She flung the curtains wide open. I watched her close her eyes and smile against the sunshine. “Like what?”

  “Like you would’ve rather gone to bed at a reasonable hour.”

  She laughed, plopped herself down at the foot of my bed, and rubbed my knee through the duvet. “Happy birthday, Maren.” I hadn’t seen her that happy in a long time.

  Over chocolate-chip pancakes I dipped my hand into a gift bag with one big book inside—The Lord of the Rings, three volumes in one—and a Barnes & Noble gift card. We spent most of the day at the bookstore. That night she took me out to an Italian restaurant, a real Italian restaurant, where the waiters and the chef all spoke to each other in the mother tongue, the walls were covered in old black-and-white family photograp
hs, and the minestrone would keep you full for days.

  It was dark in there, and I bet I’ll always remember how the light from the red glass votive holder flickered on Mama’s face as she raised the soupspoon to her lips. We talked about how things were going at school, how things were going at work. We talked about my going to college: what I might like to study, what I might like to be. A soft square of tiramisu arrived with a candle stuck in it, and all the waiters sang to me, but in Italian: Buon compleanno a te.

  Afterward she took me to see Titanic at the last-chance cinema, and for three hours I lost myself in the story the way I could in my favorite books. I was beautiful and brave, someone destined to love and to survive, to be happy and to remember. Real life held none of those things for me, but in the pleasant darkness of that shabby old theater I forgot it never would.

  I tumbled into bed, exhausted and content, because in the morning I could feast on my leftovers and read my new book. But when I woke up the apartment was too still, and I couldn’t smell the coffee. Something was wrong.

  I came down the hall and found a note on the kitchen table:

  I’m your mother and I love you but I can’t do this anymore.

  She couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t be. How could she?

  I looked at my hands, palms up, palms down, like they didn’t belong to me. Nothing else did: not the chair I sank into, not the table I laid my forehead on, not the window I stared through. Not even my own mother.

  I didn’t understand. I hadn’t done the bad thing in more than six months. Mama was all settled into her new job and we liked this apartment. None of this made sense.

  I ran into her bedroom and found the sheets and comforter still on the bed. She’d left other things too. On the nightstand, paperback novels she’d already read. In the bathroom, almost-empty bottles of shampoo and hand lotion. A few blouses, the not-as-pretty ones, were still hanging in the closet on those cheap wire hangers you get at the dry cleaner’s. We left stuff like this whenever we moved, but this time I was one of the things she’d left behind.

  Trembling, I went back into the kitchen and read the note again. I don’t know if you can read between the lines when there’s only one sentence, but I could read all the things she hadn’t said clearly enough:

  I can’t protect you anymore, Maren. Not when it’s the rest of the world I should be protecting instead.

  If you only knew how many times I thought about turning you in, having you locked up so you could never do it again …

  If you only knew how I hate myself for bringing you into the world …

  I did know. And I should have known when she took me out for my birthday, because it was too special not to have been the last thing we’d do together. That was how she’d planned it.

  I’d only ever been a burden to her. A burden and a horror. All this time she’d done what she’d done because she was afraid of me.

  I felt strange. There was a ringing in my ears like you get when it’s too quiet, except it was like resting my head against a church bell that had just chimed.

  Then I noticed something else on the table: a thick white envelope. I didn’t have to open it to know there was money inside. My stomach turned over. I got up and stumbled out of the kitchen.

  I went to her bed, burrowed under the comforter, and curled up as tight as I could. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to sleep this off, to wake up and find it undone, but you know how it is when you desperately want to get back to sleep. When you desperately want anything.

  The rest of the day passed in a daze. I never cracked The Lord of the Rings. I didn’t read a thing besides the words in that note. Later on I got up again and wandered around the house, too sick even to think of eating anything, and when it got dark I went to bed and lay awake for hours. I didn’t want to be alive. What kind of life could I have?

  I couldn’t sleep in an empty apartment. I couldn’t cry either, because she hadn’t left me anything to cry over. If she loved it, she took it with her.

  * * *

  Penny Wilson was my first and last babysitter. From then on my mother kept me in daycare, where the employees were overwhelmed and underpaid and there was never any danger of anyone taking a shine to me.

  Nothing happened for years. I was a model child, quiet and sober and eager to learn, and over time my mother convinced herself I hadn’t done that horrible thing. Memories distort themselves, turning over into truths that are easier to live with. It had been a satanic cult. They’d murdered my babysitter, bathed me in blood, and given me an eardrum to chew on. It wasn’t my fault—it wasn’t me. I wasn’t a monster.

  So when I was eight Mama sent me to summer camp. It was one of those places where the boys and the girls live in cabins on opposite sides of a lake. We sat apart in the dining hall too, and we were hardly ever allowed to play together. During arts-and-crafts hour the girls wove key chains and friendship bracelets, and later we learned how to gather kindling and build a campfire, though we never actually got to have one after dark. We slept in bunk beds, eight girls to a cabin, and every night before bed our counselor would check our heads for ticks.

  We swam in the lake every morning, even on cloudy days when the water was cold and murky. The other girls only waded in up to their waists and stood listlessly in the shallows, waiting for the sound of the lunch bell.

  But I was a good swimmer. I felt alive in the cold dark water. Some nights I even fell asleep in my bathing suit. One morning I decided to swim all the way across the lake to the boys’ side just to say I’d done it. So I swam and swam, reveling in the feeling of my limbs cutting through the bracing water, only dimly aware of the lifeguard whistling for me to turn back.

  I paused to check my progress, and that’s when I saw him. He must’ve had the same idea about reaching the girls’ side. “Hi,” he called.

  “Hi,” I said.

  We stopped there, treading water maybe fifteen feet apart, just looking at each other. The clouds seethed overhead. The rain would start any second. On both sides the lifeguards whistled frantically. We swam a bit closer, close enough to reach out and touch fingertips. He had bright red hair and more freckles than anyone I’d ever seen, boy or girl—so freckled you could hardly see any paleness underneath. He flashed me a conspiratorial grin, as if we already knew each other and had arranged to meet here, at the dead center of a lake no one else wanted to swim in.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  “Not if we stay here forever,” he said.

  I smiled. “I’m not that good a swimmer.”

  “I’ll show you how to stay up for hours. All you have to do is rest easy and let your brain float. See?” He leaned back and let his ears sink beneath the surface. All I could see was his face in the water, turned up toward the sky where the sun should have been.

  “You never get tired?” I said, louder so he could hear me.

  The boy came up and shook the water out of his ears. “Nope.”

  So I tried it. We were close now, close enough that he reached out and touched my hand. I bobbed up again and laughed as I drummed my fingertips up and down his arm. “I know,” he said. “I’m awfully frecksy.”

  The lifeguards on either side of the lake went on blowing—I could hear the whistles even when I let my ears go beneath the surface—but we knew they wouldn’t jump in and drag us back. Not even the lifeguards wanted to swim in that water.

  I have no idea how long we stayed that way, but I guess it couldn’t have been as long as I remember. If this were anyone’s story but mine, it would have been the first time I met my childhood sweetheart.

  * * *

  His name was Luke, and over the next few days he found ways of reaching me. Twice he left a note on my pillow, and one day after lunch he led me around the back of the rec hall with a shoebox under his arm. Once we’d found a sheltered place he took off the lid and showed me a collection of cicada shells. “I find them in the bushes,” he said, like it was
some great secret. “It’s the exoskeleton. They shed ’em once in a lifetime. Isn’t that cool?” He plucked one of the shells out of the box and put it in his mouth.

  “They’re pretty tasty,” he said as he munched. “Why are you making a gross-out face?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Don’t be such a girl.” He took out a second shell. “Here, try one.” Crunch, crunch. “I gotta grab a salt shaker at dinner, they’ll be even tastier with some salt.”

  He put the shell in my palm and I looked at it. Something flickered then, in a dark corner of my mind: I knew about things that weren’t meant to be eaten.

  Then the whistle blew for afternoon roll call. I dropped the locust shell in the shoebox and ran away.

  That night I found a third note under my pillow. He’d written the first two like he was introducing himself to a new pen pal: My name is Luke Vanderwall, I’m from Springfield, Delaware + I have 2 little sisters, this is my 3rd summer at Camp Ameewagan + it’s my favorite time of the whole year. I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ll have somebody to swim with even if we have to break the rules to do it.…

  This one was short. Meet me outside at 11 o’clock, it said, + together we will go 4th + have many adventures.

  That night I had my bathing suit on under my pajamas. I lay in bed until I heard everyone breathing evenly, and then I unlatched the screen door and slipped out of the cabin. He was already there, standing just beyond the arc of the porch light. I tiptoed down to meet him and he took my hand and tugged me into the dark. “Come on,” he whispered.

  “I can’t.” I shouldn’t.

  “’Course you can. Come on! I want to show you something.” Hand in hand, we stumbled past the rec hall back to the boys’ camp. After a few minutes I could see the cabins through the trees, but then he drew me away from them, deeper into the darkness.

  The woods were alive in a way I’d never noticed in the daytime. The slip of an old moon hung above the trees, giving us just enough light to see by, and fireflies hovered all around, flashing their green-gold lights. I wondered what they were saying to each other. There was a night breeze, so cool and fresh that I imagined it was the pines sighing out the good clean air, and the forest hummed with an invisible orchestra of cicadas and owls and bullfrogs.